Google Rolls Out Consumer Ratings Annotations in AdWords

Google has announced the roll out of consumer ratings annotations on its AdWords blog.

The Internet giant has confirmed the new format for PPC advertising - that provides detailed consumer opinion data to emphasise a particular strong point of a business - is now available in the UK as well as in the US and Canada.

With the new feature, businesses will be able to highlight things such as reward practices, customer service and discounts, as seen in the example below. The focus will be relevant for the industry in question, so insurance companies will emphasis claims handling, while an airline ad would focus instead of something like a rewards program.

Image courtesy of AdWords blog

Google AdWords group product manager, Shreyas Doshi, explained in the blog: "Consumer ratings annotations highlight one or more strongly rated aspects of your business as part of your ad.

"For example, if you're an insurance company, this annotation may be focused on claims handling. If you're an airline, it may highlight your rewards program."

Doshi goes on to emphasise testing with beta advertisers showed a fairly substantial increase in click through rates - up 10% on average.

Farmers Insurance Group was one such participant and its director of digital marketing, Brian Borkowksi was quick to point out the success of the new feature.

He said: "Consumer ratings annotations help us stand out from competitors and attract new customers.

"When we looked at our ads that displayed these ratings, we saw an increase in CTR, which speaks to the awareness, trust and impact from this format"

The data has been collected from a huge number of surveys Google has ran using its Google Consumer Survey platform and the ratings are based on literally hundreds of completed surveys, with the average actually more than 1,000.

Google also plans to constantly refresh the survey data to keep the data up-to-date.